Throughout the summer of 1980, polls showed that Americans weren’t quite sure whether Reagan was up to the job of President, and so Carter and Reagan were fairly even in the polls. The shift to Reagan didn’t occur till they got to see him in the debates in October.

No such doubt would have existed about GHW Bush. He had tremendous experience in numerous Federal posts. His campaign ads pointed out how much more experienced he would be to hit the ground runninng as President than Carter was.

Carter certainly did screw up. To the point that even Ted Kennedy revolted against him and tried to take the 1980 Dem nomination away from him. That’s why Carter lost. He would have lost to just about any Repub candidate.

It’s way too early to know whether Obama will screw up badly. Carter’s biggest screwups occurred in the second half of his term. I lived through that era as an adult. As I recall, no one in 1977 (Carter’s first year in office) predicted that he was going to crash and burn so badly in the rest of his term. We tend to remember Carter for the last 18 disastrous months of his Presidency.

So once again, I advise my fellow conservatives to have patience. If Obama is even a middling decent President, he will win a second term in 2012, no matter what we say or do. In the meantime, let’s develop our own ideas and platform, and wait.

If Obama screws up badly, then we can pounce.

Personally, I miss the swagger and go with yer gut style of leadership. No wait, I don’t

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s top military officer has conducted secret war games to evaluate the two primary military options that have been put forward by the Pentagon and are being weighed by the Obama Administration as part of a broad-based review of the faltering Afghanistan war, senior military officials said.

The exercise this month, led by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, examined the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more soldiers to conduct a full-scale counter-insurgency effort aimed at building a stable government that can control most of Afghanistan. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and marines as part of an approach dubbed ”counter-terrorism plus”.

Both options were drawn from a detailed analysis prepared by General Stanley McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan, and were forwarded to the President, Barack Obama, by the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates.

Like the 100% unpaid for Medicare Part D entitlement? Oh. Never mind.

…and a worldwide self-flagellating campaign to appease our enemies.

After the absolute wretched failure of Republican foreign policy for the past 8 years, do you REALLY want to go there? Really?

………Correct…….Reagan actually tripled the federal debt……that is not a misprint…..tripled…….Bush was an amateur by comparison he only managed to double it…..that is not a misprint……doubled

Ah – but I wrote about federal outlays as a percentage of GDP, and not deficits. Different bases. Although one could note that the deficit growth was mitigated somewhat by Reagan signing tax increases in every year after his first in office.

Conservatives still do favor a balanced budget – particularly when they have absolutely no real responsibility for passing or implementing it.

I’m with you about the battle being over government/corporate marriages. There’s a great piece on Salon today about how the Obama reforms for the investment community are far short of what is needed – we need to take seriously Volker’s admonition that institution that are “too big to fail” should be broken up as a precondition to government bailing them out.

I did find myself nodding in agreement with one aspect of the original post- generals and politicos DO prefer to fight the last war.
Which explains the need to paint Obama as a “Socialist” and make this into a war between free market Capitalists versus Soviet style Socialists. The pundits KNOW how to win that war.
But that conveniently ignores some complexities- namely, that:

1. Lliberals are anything but. Even the Commu-Nazi Himself, B. HUSSEIN Obama is insisting the healthcare be deficit neutral; even if they fudge the numbers and cook the books, I don’t see anyone really calling for tax hikes in the range of oh, say, Eisenhower (34th President- Socialist Worker’s Party), when taxes were around 80% for the top tiers.

2. Conservatives are anything but. Conservatives used to favor a balanced budget. Name one- ONE- GOP contender for 2012 who has a serious plan for a balanced budget. Or even speaks wistfully about it. Conservatives used to be cautious, skeptical about the government’s ability to engineer societies. Today they are Wilsonian interventionists, quite certain of the government’s ability to mediate between Sunni and Shia, and establish a peaceful, liberal democracy in Afghanistan. Not to mention their certainty that a government bureaucrat knows exactly what Terri Shiavo was thinking.

The last war was between those who wanted to destroy the free market and substiture government planning; today the threat to the free market comes not from government planners, but from government/corporate marriages, like Goldman Sachs and Halliburton- neither free market nor publicly controlled, it has the worst aspects of both.

But neither party really wants to talk about that, because it doesn’t fit the convenient narrative that wins elections.

Just to be clear – because sometimes facts are necessary to shed a new light on certain mythologies – the average annual federal spending as a percentage of GDP during the Carter years was 30.45%. During the Reagan years, that ratio was 32.35%.

So perhaps you should be talking about the huge increases in spending during the 1980’s?